


Do We Have A Problem?

by jesuisherve



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Boyfriends, Established Relationship, M/M, Nobody is Dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-19 20:11:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1482385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jesuisherve/pseuds/jesuisherve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A post-Skyfall AU where Raoul survives and James eventually left MI6, and they joined up together. James runs into someone from his past completely by chance and they play a little catch up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do We Have A Problem?

**Author's Note:**

> I will eventually write something about how I think Raoul survived and escaped and why I think James left, and how they found each other and became a couple, but this demanded to be written so here it is.

James opens his eyes. He stretches and his shoulder tugs in complaint. He rolls it anyway, ignoring a twinge of discomfort. The sun is shining. It has been up for three hours. Noise from outside; vehicles, voices, a dog barking, some music, float in through the window. It is open slightly. James heaves his feet over the side of the bed and they touch on wood. He stands and walks to the bathroom. Running water from the tap, he splashes it over his face. He blinks beads of it out of his eyes and looks in the mirror. His cropped hair is too short to be messy from sleep and his face has a dust of stubble. He chooses not to shave.

Back in the room, James opens a dresser drawer and selects clothing for the day. Dark trousers and a light coloured button-up. He keeps it simple and appropriate for the weather, which is beginning to get warm. He adjusts the collar of his shirt. “Are you getting up?” he asks.

A stifled murmur from the bed is the reply. James grabs a pack of cigarettes from on top of the dresser, and a lighter. He puts them in his trouser pocket and looks at the bed. The shape beneath the blankets is moving. “I want breakfast,” James says.

“A few more minutes,” the voice says from under the covers. The words are sleepy.

James opens the window fully. He takes a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lights it. He usually does not smoke so early in the day, but he feels that he will be waiting for longer than ‘a few more minutes.’ He puffs the smoke into the outside air. Raoul hates smoke in the bedroom, but James likes to smoke late at night in comfort, so this is their compromise. The cigarette pack gets tucked back into his pocket.

Raoul stirs and his blond head emerges from the blankets. He looks luxurious. James takes a drag from the cigarette. Everything Raoul does looks luxurious, though he claims that he cuts everything superfluous from his life. He blinks his eyes and stretches as James did minutes before. James fondly thinks that Raoul cannot exist in any other state of being simply because the man himself is luxury. His existence is opulent. He could change that as easily as he could change the makeup of his DNA.

“I’ll leave without you,” James says, smoke curling up in tendrils from his mouth. His stomach growls. He is hungry for the first time in days. James finds that his appetite comes and goes. When it is present, he becomes impatient to eat.

“Go then,” Raoul waves a hand. “I’ll meet you. Text me, darling, when you decide where you are going.”

James nods, pitches the cigarette out the window, and picks up his phone and wallet. Raoul gets out of bed to give James a hug and a kiss. It is a greeting and a goodbye. “I’ll see you soon,” James says, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth the way his shoulder tugs when he moves it, “I’ll be down the block.”

\--

The day is gorgeous. James sits at an outside table on the patio of a cafe. There is coffee before him. He prefers tea but the waitress brought him the wrong cup. He does not correct her. He sips it in silence and waits for his food. He told the waitress to surprise him with whatever was her favourite. She is young with round cheeks and green eyes. She smiled at him as she took his order and promised that he would not be disappointed. James wonders if his bill will include her phone number. He lights another cigarette. She can’t be older than eighteen. Even if he was interested, she _was_ beautiful, he was beginning to feel his age. She was so _young_.

“When did your priorities change, hmm?” he asks himself. The cell phone in his shirt pocket buzzes. It’s a text from Raoul. James forgot to message him. He replies with the name of the cafe. Raoul will know which it is, they’ve gone often enough.

“Your man isn’t here today?” Another waitress asks. She isn’t the one who took his order. It’s a girl in her twenties with auburn hair who waited on him and Raoul a few times before. She is carrying a pot of coffee and tops up his cup. James smiles a thank you at her and wracks his brain to recall her name. She isn’t wearing a name tag. “He’s meeting me later,” he says.

“Well maybe I’ll pop by to say hello when he gets here,” she gives a little wave and leaves to check her other tables.

_‘Andrea,’_ James thinks to himself. That’s her name. Andrea.

He adds a touch more cream to the coffee and stirs it as he finishes his cigarette. It’s down nearly to a filter when a woman’s voice calls his name. It rings clear in the air over the voices of customers, over the distant radio, over the cars and scooters trundling by on the street. “James Bond?”

James snaps his head in the direction it came from. Eve Moneypenny is standing on the sidewalk, sensible flats on her feet and a stylish red jacket hanging marvellously off her shoulders. It’s been custom fit by a good tailor. James does not startle easy, but his heart stops beating for a second or two.

“Eve,” he says.

“What are you doing here?” she hisses, swinging one leg after the other over the squat fence that separates the cafe’s patio from pedestrians walking by. She takes the chair across from him. Her brow is wrinkled in a frown and her skin seems ashen. She is as surprised as he is.

“I’m getting breakfast,” he says although he knows that is not what she means. Her frown turns into an eye roll. James sips his coffee as if he did not notice but he notices a great deal. Eve’s jacket is well-tailored, perfect for hiding a gun in a shoulder holster and keeping it concealed from casual viewers. James is no casual viewer. He still has suits tailored the same way in his closet, although they’re zipped up in plastic. There is a tiny scar on the curve of her cheek. Caused by a fleck of flying debris, perhaps, or maybe gunpowder that she had gotten taken out? Her hair is longer. The curls are as lively and vivacious as he remembers. She is as lively and vivacious as he remembers, too.

“You’re back in the field?” he asks, pointedly not answering her question.

“Yeah,” she says, “I was put back in about a week after you disappeared. We were short on agents, apparently. I’m filling in for now.” She pauses to study his face. She remarks how tan he is and the stubble on his cheeks. It isn’t bloated, drunk, hasn’t-shaved-in-days stubble. He seems healthy. Well rested, even. He sits relaxed in the chair, like he is unconcerned with meeting an MI6 agent after all these years.

“Congratulations,” he stubs out his cigarette butt on an ashtray next to his coffee. “It’s treating you well?”

“It is.” She remembers how he had warned her that field work wasn’t for everyone. So far she enjoys it. It’s demanding but it forces her to be at her best. She does, however, understand why he ran from it. It isn’t for everyone, even though he hid it well for awhile. Who would have guessed that it wouldn’t be for James Bond?

“What brings you here?”

“An assignment.” She tells him. Maybe she can goad him into being more forthcoming with his answers if she is honest with hers.

James crosses his arms. He isn’t hostile, he is still relaxed. He lifts his shoulders as if they pain him and drops them. “Looking for me?”

Eve laughs. It is a genuine, open laugh. “No. Luckily for you, there were enough people at MI6 who vouched for you. We convinced Mallory not to put out a burn notice.”

“A burn notice?” James sounds amused. “For me? And I thought he and I were getting along so well.”

It had taken two days of intense deliberation in Mallory’s office to overturn the idea of the burn notice. Mallory, to his credit, was reluctant to put it out. Bond had been a good agent and Mallory respected him. When Bond had slipped away, it caused a panic at MI6 which brought up the burn notice in the first place.

“He didn’t want a repeat of the Silva Incident.” The way Eve says it, James can hear that it is capitalized in her mind. ‘The Silva Incident’. It sounds like a bad movie, but it is an indication of how much weight it carries. Eve does not elaborate, nor does she need to. It is valid for Mallory to be concerned that the ex-007 might return for some sort of crazed re-enactment of ‘The Silva Incident’. James wonders who vouched for him. He thinks about asking Eve, reconsiders, but then opens his mouth.

“Who?”

Eve waits until the pretty waitress with the round cheeks sets James’ food in front of him. She is right; he is not disappointed in the food. A delicious smelling omelette with breakfast sausage, homemade hash browns and lightly buttered toast. He thanks her again and Eve politely declines to order anything for herself. After the waitress leaves, Eve talks as James takes the first bite of his meal.

“I vouched, obviously. Q did as well. The psychiatrist you failed your psych evaluation with vouched for you, too.” She smiles when James makes a noise at that. His mouth is full of food and he cannot articulate a question. “He is sure that you’re not going to return for revenge or something. You’ve left MI6 before but came back when it was in danger. He says you’re not like Silva.”

James chokes on a mouthful of omelette. He swallows with difficulty, coughs, and drinks coffee to clear his throat. “Not like Silva,” he repeats. He is laughing internally but keeps it out of his voice. The psychiatrist was right about everything except that. James is, in fact, very like Silva. A different way than Mallory fears, but they are alike.

Eve watches James check his cell phone. There has been a tiny shift in his demeanour. If she had not been paying as close attention as she was, she would have missed it. James is no longer as relaxed. The way he holds his knife and fork is a tip. Easy to twist his grip and use them as a weapon. She does not believe he does this consciously, which sets off louder alarms in her head. He is not viewing her as a threat but he is threatened by something. He is reacting on instinct. Her eyes flicker with recognition.

“Silva is alive,” she says. It’s been nearly four years since the incident but Silva’s file had been closed, marked with ‘deceased’.

James picks up the coffee mug. “It’s possible. He was a better agent than me.”

Eve gives him a hard look. She isn’t trying to hide her scrutiny. James smiles, it’s small, but a smile all the same.

“You can trust me,” Eve says. It strikes James as odd for her to start that way. Not _‘tell me the truth’_ , or ‘ _what do you know?’_. She starts with trust. Smart move. She suspects (rightfully so, he thinks) that Silva is indeed alive, and that James knows more than he is admitting.

“So you say.”

She makes a face. “From one agent to another.”

He lifts the mug in a gesture of acknowledgement, a toast to her keen sense of perception. She can sense where to dig in her claws. “Former agent,” he corrects her. She makes another face which tells him he’s a moron. James sips the coffee. “I’ve seen him,” he allows. His tone is low. His cell buzzes with another text. He looks at it casually, and then sweeps their surroundings with his eyes.

A prickle runs up Eve’s back. James knows how she has been trained. He knows that she can read body language with fair accuracy; he knows that she is watching his movements and analyzing them. He is totally unafraid of her, or at least of what her course of action will be. “He’s here,” she states. “In this city.”

James sees no reason to deny it. She’s a bright girl. She would figure it out even if he pretended that Raoul wasn’t. “Mmm” is all he says. A hum in the affirmative.

“I should go,” she says.

James drains the mug of coffee.

A thought occurs to Eve. “Are you going to kill him?”

As smart as she is, she has not caught on. Is the truth inconceivable to her? Four years is a long time. Perhaps her image of the man James Bond used to be is clouded by time, or maybe it was clouded from the beginning. Reputation is an interesting manipulator of perception. James knows that Eve will not come to the right conclusion alone. He feels no desire to help her to it. “No,” he says. “I’m not.” He eats more of his breakfast. Eve seems torn on whether to leave or to press for more information.

Her gut is telling her to run but her brain is telling her to investigate. The feeling in her gut is a hollow, pitfall feeling. It is what animals experience when a predator stalks through the night. It is survival instinct. Eve is exceedingly attuned to hers, but she pushes the feeling aside. Her mind overrides the sense of danger and says that James is not concerned, so she neither is she.

“Are you a threat, Bond?” Her tone is all business. She is bold. James laughs at it but how else is she supposed to interpret the evidence? He has run from MI6, virtually disappearing from the face of the Earth, and now she finds him by accident and he has full knowledge of Raoul Silva’s whereabouts and no plan to kill him. It is the only logical conclusion to come to, given what she knows about James and Raoul’s past encounters.

“You can rest easy, Agent,” he says. “I have no interest in MI6, as long as you keep away. Mallory once said that it is rare for an agent to quietly quit the business. This is me quitting. Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone. But,” he places the knife and fork on his plate and taps the table between them, “here is my advice for you. Do with it as you will. Do not go looking for Raoul. If any of you come after him, you will have me to contend with.”

_“You to contend with?”_ Eve spits out. She almost cannot believe what she is hearing. Bond used Silva’s first name and it rolled off his tongue with familiarity. “You’re protecting him?” she demands.

“Oh, James,” a rich voice behind her makes Eve jump. “Don’t tease the poor girl.” She curses herself for letting down her guard in a moment of emotion. As she turns towards the voice, she reaches into her jacket to grasp her gun. Despite her dull hope for the contrary, the owner of the voice is Raoul Silva. He is holding a cup of coffee and his other hand is shoved in his pocket. Eve does not believe he has a weapon, but she is not sure. She looks to James but sees nothing on his face. She does not draw her gun but neither does she remove her hand. Raoul looks more tan than the photo in his dossier. A tan to match Bond’s. The outdoors has done him some good. He looks healthy, too. He is wearing a bright paisley shirt, his trousers are cream coloured, and the shoes on his feet are casual but expensive deck shoes.

Silva pulls a chair away from an empty table to sit with them. Eve watches him warily, ready to act if Raoul—or James— tries anything. Silva looks her up and down, clicks his tongue like one would at a cute puppy, and kisses Bond on the mouth after saying a cheery “hullo, darling”. Eve masks her shock at the kiss with a neutral expression. She does nothing when Silva settles in his chair and winks at her.

“James, may I ask who this lovely woman is?” Silva’s dark eyes dance. Eve is unsure if he knows her, or if he has guessed who she works for. The pitfall feeling in her stomach is thunderous. She should have left earlier when she felt anxious the first time. This man is the predator who stalks the night.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I must be off. It was a nice chat, but pardon me if I don’t keep in touch.” She stands and smoothes out creases in the legs of her dress pants. “I’ll remember what you told me, James.” She flicks two fingers at the level of her brow. A salute. “Make sure that you stick with it.”

James watches her hop over the patio fence again and disappear into the crowd of civilians. Raoul kisses him a second time but presses his lips to James’ neck rather than his mouth. James feels the man’s tongue brush across his skin. An audacious move in a public place. James does not reprimand him. “Do we have a problem, darling?” Raoul breathes. His breath is warm but feels cool on the spot where his tongue had been. James holds back a shiver.

“No,” The former agent picks up his utensils again. He resumes eating. His stomach has been neglected for too long this morning. “Not with her.”


End file.
